Between 12 000 and 8000 years ago a variety of different farming systems began to appear around the world. The emergence of farming reflects the coevolution of humans and plants, in that both acted to transform the other. Over the millennia more than 300 different plants have been domesticated, of which about 25 are today considered staples. Different plants and techniques appropriate to their ...

Global consciousness of food safety, health and environmental issues has stimulated interest in alternative agricultural systems like organic farming. Since information on organic farming of tuber crops is meagre, a field experiment was conducted in split plot design over a five-year period at Central Tuber Crops Research Institute, India. The aims were to evaluate the impact of organic, c...

Sustainability is de®ned as the ability of a system to `continue'. In view of this de®nition, several aspects of the crop protection activity in organic farming are reviewed according to their ability to `continue'. As no absolute measure of sustainability is available, this analysis takes the form of a comparison between organic and conventional crop protection methods. Two elements of crop pr...

Organic farming is increasingly recognized as a prototype for sustainable agriculture. Its guidelines ban the use of artificial fertilizers. However, organic farms may import nutrients from conventional farming through material exchanges. In this study, we aimed at estimating the magnitude of these flows through the quantification of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium inflows from conventional ...

introduction: one of the fundamental issues in the agricultural sector in iran is the absence of optimal water and soil resources utilization and lack of new agricultural science and technology adoption through major prevailing transformations in agricultural land exploitation system. the studies conducted in the history of agricultural development in iran cast light on the fact that the farmin...

This paper innovates as it tests two different hypotheses regarding climate impacts on agricultural markets in Brazil: farmers only observe the average climate conditions of their region when deciding the type and amount of crop/animal to grow/raise; and weather diversions from normal climate conditions deviate farmers from their optimal profits. Both hypotheses are not rejected by the data. Th...